This article reviews workers' struggles for a better future in South Africa, including those for collective bargaining rights, racial equality, and social justice. The outcome is uneven, with fairly successful struggles for collective bargaining rights, political inclusion, and formal racial equality, but with less success in achieving substantive racial equality and social justice. Under the pressure of neoliberal globalization, the ruling ANC has prioritized an economic agenda favorable to domestic and foreign capital investment, leading to job losses. Local government initiatives have subjected their basic needs (municipal) infrastructure operations to the principles of cost recovery, often implemented through repression. More positively, under pressure from unions, the state has also extended the social wage package and has begun to address unemployment with a labor-intensive public works program, suggesting potential for social democracy in a developing country. Likely future strategies for increasing social justice include increasingly merged domestic mobilizations of unions and community groups, and wider developing country labor internationalism aimed at contesting neoliberalism.

Key words: worker's struggle, South Africa, collective bargaining rights, racial equality, social justice, neoliberalism, democratization, developing country, social democracy

Privatization of public services is a global development, taking place under specific political, economic, and cultural conditions in different spaces. This article examines the privatization of water companies in East German municipalities facing shrinking processes (deindustrialization/de-economization, as well as the loss of population and suburbanization). Shrinking processes endanger the technical and financial capacities of water companies, and many local governments in East Germany see the only possible solution in a (partial) privatization of water supply and wastewater disposal systems. Because of their crucial importance for every area of social life, water and wastewater infrastructures have become a terrain in which a contested re-articulation between public and private takes place. Furthermore, they have become a means of uneven socio-spatial development. Drawing on the "splintering urbanism" approach, this article explores these dynamics and their implications with special reference to the city of Frankfurt/Oder, which is located on the Polish-German border.

Key words: shrinking processes, "splintering urbanism," privatization of water, urban governance, Germany

In 1997, the state of Wisconsin contracted out to five private agencies the administration Milwaukee's Wisconsin Works (W-2) program, which provides cash aid and social services to poor families (most of whom are headed by women). Milwaukee's Private Industry Council was given oversight over the agencies, but it exercised this oversight very loosely. Advocates of neoliberalism claimed that private administration of public services would make them more efficient. The result, however, was a series of scandals involving the misuse of millions of dollars in welfare funds, kickbacks to a state politician, and the unfair denial of welfare to needy families. In response, unions, community groups, and welfare recipients organized a series of actions, calling for better regulation of, or the termination of, welfare contracts to private agencies. Despite steadfast state support for welfare privatization, activists managed to publicize contractors' misdeeds, to gain federal and state support for increased regulation of these welfare contracts, and to pressure contractors to curb some of their worst abuses.

Key words: welfare privatization, U.S. welfare reform, resistance, Wisconsin Works, Milwaukee, multi-pronged strategy, social movements

Despite the return of a Labour government, in the post-Thatcher years New Labour's neoliberal approach to welfare reform strongly embraces privatization while reinforcing racial-ethnic, gendered, and class inequalities. Community-based organizations in Britain struggle to exist in the aftermath of Thatcherism and try to survive within the context of Thatcherite-like policies and a waning welfare state. Within this context, some community-based organizations have played a valuable role as service providers by meeting the needs of poor, low-income, "ethnic minority" communities and by enabling those who seek services to become more politically aware and knowledgeable.

Key words: race, intersectionality, women, neoliberalism, welfare state, Britain, community-based organizations

Though not a new phenomenon, private security companies have mushroomed since the early 1990s all over Germany (and beyond). The withdrawal of state responsibility for public services in general goes with the privatization of security specifically. Using the concepts of "roll-out" and "roll-back" neoliberalism, this article provides an overview of the development of private security companies in Germany and their most current activities. It focuses on the (extra-legal) activities of rent-a-cops in German social housing complexes and "migration management" of asylum-seekers. Additionally, examples of protest and resistance against the practices of private security companies, especially against neofascist security staff, are given. Thus, the article analyzes the vanishing of state responsibilities and the "roll-out" of neoliberalism, German style.

Key words: roll-out neoliberalism, roll-back neoliberalism, Germany, privatization of security, glocalization, governance

The security services industry operates at the intersection of routine public safety concerns, threats to homeland security, changing labor markets, and the restructuring of urban economies. Private security companies that are contracted to patrol revitalized downtown districts, mass transit systems, and urban 'high-crime areas' are at the center of an unfolding transformation in how public spaces are secured. Increasingly, security companies have been able to broker contracts with the public sector to take on policing functions that formerly had been the domain of government law enforcement agencies. This article traces the re-territorialization of urban security provision that is underway in Chicago. Drawing on case studies of the public transit system and public housing developments, we consider the implications of advanced technology and privatized security personnel for how public spaces are policed.

Key words: private security services, mass transit, public housing, public space, surveillance, Chicago

The expansion of regulatory authority by government at all levels -- city, county, state, and federal -- has resulted in an attack upon the intent of the framers of the U.S. Constitution to protect property ownership. Measures such as eminent domain have allowed government to increase the taking of property. The purpose of this article is to discuss the use of eminent domain by government to seize property from owners, especially homeowners. Specifically examined is the general use of eminent domain strategies by cities and counties to take property from homeowners to benefit private commercial interests rather than public interests. The article provides an overview of the notion of eminent domain, a discussion of Kelo v. City of New London (125 S. Ct. 2655 [2005]) regarding the use of eminent domain to circumvent homeowner property rights, and a case study of how homeowners in Riverside County, California, responded to the taking of their property by local government agencies.

Key words: eminent domain, redevelopment, Kelo v. City of New London, Riverside, California

The old housing stock in the inner city of East Berlin (GDR) declined until 1989 because the political decision was taken to disinvest. After the regime change in 1989, which entailed West Germany's annexation of the former German Democratic Republic, the housing market and urban policy in East Berlin were totally changed. A new renewal regime was established with the attempt to copy administrative structures from West to East. Unlike renewal conditions in West Berlin, urban and housing policy in East Berlin had to deal with an emerging economization of housing markets, a fundamental crisis of public budgets, and increasing demand for gentrified tenements. This article describes the instruments and consequences of the new renewal policy as a "roll out" strategy of neoliberalism. The mode of regulation changed from social housing policy to a moderation of market processes. The tenants' participation changed from a collective and political representation of common interests to a customized bargaining about the conditions of modernization. As a result, this renewal policy boosted the gentrification of the renewal areas.

Key words: urban renewal, housing policies, roll-out neoliberalism, Germany, gentrification

This article examines a new type of gated communities that has developed in the periphery of Mexico City, the foregoing versions of which were residential complexes promoted by the two major housing organizations. Changes in urban and housing policy from the 1990s onward enabled access to the financial resources of the workers' fund and to large expanses of agricultural, socially owned land (ejidos). This encouraged the construction of large complexes of thousands of "social" dwellings that, by taking advantage of the reputation for exclusiveness and safety supposedly provided by the gated communities that were built for the rich, meant profitable real estate business in offering new gated communities for workers segregated and disconnected from the urban fabric and services.

Key words: gated communities, Mexico, housing policies

When in the summer of 2002 the world's media attention was on Toronto due to the Pope's visit, the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) used this moment to draw attention to their fight against poverty and homelessness in Canada's largest city. With relatively broad support from other activist groups, this direct action group squatted in a house in a slowly gentrifying neighborhood and was able to create a lively counter-public. Although the squatters were evicted from the building after three months, this direct action was partially successful insofar as it created a public discussion on the affordable housing crisis in Toronto, questioning the dominant, neoliberal ideology. This article describes and analyzes this event as both a strategy for resisting privatization processes in Toronto and as an attempt to build a broad-based coalition capable of fighting the policies that drive neoliberal urbanism.

Key words: housing policy, gentrification, Toronto, Canada, squatter's movement, Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, public space, neoliberalism

Since the 1970s, New York City's social service infrastructure has been administered by contracts with private, nonprofit organizations in what Jessop has called a neocorporatist version of the post-Keynesian "workfare regime." In the mid-1990s, Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani pursued a more aggressive neoliberal program with expanded, profit-oriented privatization and workfare programs. It reconfigured political networks and prompted oppositional mobilization among social service and advocacy groups. This article examines (1) the development of oppositional discourse around workfare in a context of increasing flexibilization, and (2) the use of human capital arguments against workfare and privatization despite their ideological compatibility with neoliberal policy.

Key words: workfare state, privatization, contracting, New York City, human capital, neoliberalism, neocorporatism

This article compares the impact of three protest campaigns against the implementation of neoliberal policies in Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. The policies include changes in national pension plans, reductions in university budgets, and a new sales tax. The relative success of the campaigns is measured by whether the policy was implemented. Special attention is given to the degree of public opinion support, mobilizing multiple constituencies, and alignments with strong oppositional political parties and the way these conditions combine to produce distinct protest campaigns. These popular mobilizations offer important lessons for similar movements in the global South that are struggling against unwanted economic changes associated with deepening neoliberal globalization in the 21st century.

Key words: social movements, neoliberal, globalization, Central America, global South, coalitions, policy, resistance